And All That's Best of Dark and Bright
by brightstarff
Summary: Asami Sato is the Avatar's sidekick. Sort of. [Prompt Fill for Korrasami Month - Superheroes. Modern AU. Bending is a superpower. Korra's identity is a secret.]
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: So to get myself out of my writing slump, I've put this together. It's nothing brilliant, but I hope you enjoy it, either way. I thought I'd take advantage of the prompts from Korrasami month as much as possible. This is planned to be two chapters long. If people like it, I might write some prequels of some of their earlier adventures. The title is an homage to a poem by Lord Byron._

* * *

Asami Sato doesn't know it yet, but this is the day that will haunt her for the next three years.

It starts out routinely enough—or, well, as routinely as life can be when you're the youngest CEO in the history of the world running the largest corporation in the world, and you also happen to be sort of the sidekick to the most powerful superhero in the world.

It starts out with a hostage situation.

The police have blocked the area off, and no amount of hair flipping or ID-flashing is getting her through. (Maybe it's the grease smeared on her nose, she thinks, or the messy bun, that makes them dismiss her.)

 _Where is she?_ she wonders. She makes her way back to her car and grabs her phone, pulling up a GPS map of the area.

"You shouldn't be here."

The voice startles her and her phone slips from her hand, bouncing into her car.

The Avatar.

 _"You shouldn't be here."_

"That's not the first time you've told me that," Asami says. Hastily, she wipes her hands on her pants and tries to compose herself. She turns and leans her hip with a false casualness on her Satomobile. In front of her, the Avatar is standing with her arms crossed. Today, she's in a tightfitting, blue suit with a matching blue mask over her eyes. What Asami can see of her face is compressed in frustration.

So maybe she'd been exaggerating earlier when she called herself a "sort of sidekick"—really, she'd begun running into the Avatar when Asami started dating Mako and going with him to stakeouts and busts. The Avatar started appearing, her powers impressive beyond any superpowers Asami had ever seen, and after things just…didn't work out with Mako, she'd built a police scanner for her own use. (It was just coincidence, of course, that Asami happened to appear at the same moment as the Avatar at crime scenes. It's not like Asami is trying to seek out the other woman's company. Of course. It has nothing to do with watching her rip rocks apart without touching them, or deflect bullets, or burst into fiery, impassioned blazes at every other moment. Asami Sato definitely _does not_ follow superheroes around like a schoolgirl.)

(Definitely.)

The Avatar regards her from behind her half-mask. The strong line of her jaw clenches. Asami tries to discreetly wipe her hands again. (She's just nervous about the hostages. That's all.)

Surprisingly, the superhero drops her arms to her sides with a sigh. "I mean it this time, Asami." There's something new in her voice, something…trembling, and high-pitched, and Asami instinctively straightens in concern. "There's…this is different."

The fear lying just underneath the woman's voice triggers a memory, sudden and visceral.

 _Fleeing with the Avatar slumped in her arms, unconscious and vulnerable. She glanced behind her to see a fight between the police and the Red Lotus, bullets flying, She could see the fire and rocks flying as Mako and Bolin tried to fight back, but they simply weren't strong enough._

 _Being captured by another rival political party who wanted to use the Avatar for their own purposes. The mad exhilaration of escaping._

"The Red Lotus," Asami manages around her suddenly tightening throat. It's not a question.

The Avatar flinches and turns away slightly. "Yes."

"What—"

"They…" Asami sees the line of her jaw tighten again. She takes a half-step forward. Though she doesn't know the other woman's name, she's learned some things about her in the brief moments they've run into each other. She's learned signs of joy, and fear, and pain in the other woman's body. She knows that the Red Lotus, the anarchist group intent on killing the superhero for reasons unknown to Asami, haunts the Avatar, that her capture had been too close of a call.

Right now, she reads abject despair in the thick tension of the Avatar's shoulders as she takes a deep breath and speaks.

"They want me to turn myself in."

"No!" The shout startles even herself. Her chest feels tight. "No, Avatar, you—"

"I have to." The Avatar turns back to her, mouth set in determination. "He's kidnapped children, and he's going to kill them all if I don't turn myself in in the next hour."

 _Zaheer_.

"Okay, well, what do we know about the building?" Asami asks. Her voice sounds unnaturally high to her own ears, and a strange ringing has begun to echo inside of her head. Fumbling, she grabs her phone from inside of her car, pulling up saved maps of various Future Industries construction sites. She scrolls through with shaking fingers.

"Asami…"

She ignores the other woman's voice—she knows what she wants to say, and doesn't want to hear it. "Here we go. Future Industries didn't construct this particular building, but we worked on a project next door. They actually share a basement area, so if we can get in the building of the one next door—"

A warm touch on her arm interrupts her thoughts, and she nearly drops her phone again. "Asami." The voice is firm now, and there is a heated quality underneath it that makes Asami's chest squeeze from something entirely different from panic. "I've already been through it with Mako and Bolin. And the Chief. The risks are too high." A pause. Then, softly, "I'm sorry."

There's something in the way she says it that sounds like "goodbye," and Asami blinks her eyes against a sudden burning. She turns toward the Avatar but finds herself too close, too close, and she can't _think_.

She steps back and takes a deep breath. _Think_. It's what Asami Sato does best, after all.

"You can't expect us to just let you give yourself up," she says. The slump of the Avatar's shoulders makes her pause. "I can't believe Mako and Bolin would have agreed to that plan."

She knows she's hit on something when the Avatar's mouth thins.

"They didn't, did they?" She hadn't seen them at the police line. "They're off trying to figure something else out, right? Another plan. And you're here to turn yourself in before more people could get hurt." Before the other woman can respond, her phone lights up. _Detective Mako_ , her phone tells her. Triumphantly, she leans into her car and grabs her phone. "Mako, thank goodness. The Avatar is—"

But when she turns, phone held to her ear, the alleyway is empty.

* * *

"I don't know, Mako!" she grunts in frustration, trying to work her hairclip into the lock. "Couldn't you melt this damn thing off or something?"

Mako hovers nervously over her shoulder. "I don't think I can heat it up _that_ high, Asami!" he shoots back. Bolin is off by the perimeters, trying to find _some_ sort of earth to pry up in case Asami can't pick the lock. "Can't you go faster? Why didn't your maps or whatever have this door on them? _Anything_ could be happening—"

"I _know_ , Mako—" She doesn't have time to deal with Mako's unresolved feelings toward the superhero, and the thought makes something that the back of her mind tightens uncomfortably with another emotion she _definitely_ doesn't have time to think about right now. A click, and the handle turns _just so_ , and Asami yanks it open. "I want to find her too, okay? I— _we_ can't let them hurt her. I know. We'll figure it out."

 _I hope._

They rush through into a basement that branches out in several directions. She points toward a set of stairs hidden dimly in a corner. "That way. That'll bring us up the back entrance. My guess is they'll have the hostages toward the back."

They'd decided to let the hostages loose first, knowing the Avatar would be unlikely to let them rescue her, or whatever would need to happen if the hostages were still in danger.

So they bolt up the stairs, Asami quickly fixing her electrical glove to her hand, glad she'd performed repairs on it the day before. Bolin yelps as she fires it up and a few bolts of electricity shoot out.

" _Quiet_ , bro!" Mako scolds him.

Sighing internally, Asami reaches out and gently turns the knob. It turns easily in her hand, and she carefully opens the door a crack. When nothing happens, she opens it fully and steps into a dark, tiled room. Mako calls up a flame next to her, and suddenly a hundred tiny, frightened faces look back at her. The light from the flame glances off teardrops, lighting up the children's faces in a strange cacophony of fear and hope.

No one moves for a moment. "Uh," Asami starts. She hadn't exactly thought about _how_ this would go and something still feels _off_. Like this has been too easy. "You're…safe…now?" she tries. Next to her, Mako sighs and reaches in his pocket.

"Republic City PD. It's okay now," he murmurs as he flashes his badge. All at once, the hundred thousand specks of tears and fear and happiness rush at them, and they are nearly bowled over into the basement. "Whoa, whoa!" Mako shouts. "C'mon, we need to escape, okay?"

"But the Avatar!" one young girl cries from somewhere in front of them. Asami squints into the darkness.

"What, have you seen her?" Bolin says, picking up toddlers in each arm.

The heads nod collectively.

"Where is she?" Asami presses, throat tight, and Mako shoots her a glance at the sharpness in her tone.

A young girl with two buns in her hair makes a frantic gesture. "The bad man took her! There was a big fight, and lots of explosions, and _fire_!"

Mako kneels down next to her. "Where did they go?"

She looks uncertain at first, but when Asami gives her an encouraging nod, she points to a door on the other side of the room.

 _Stairs to the roof,_ Asami guesses, seeing the vague outline of a sign next to it. She turns to Mako and Bolin. "You two focus on getting the kids out."

Immediately, Mako's eyebrows lower and his face hardens. "Asami, that wasn't the plan—"

"You said it yourself, Mako, we don't have _time_. If one of us goes to find her now, instead of all of us taking the children out, maybe there's something we can do to help."

"But, shouldn't one of _us_ go?" Bolin says.

One of _us_. Someone with superpowers. Benders.

Asami sees Mako cringe, but she shakes her head at him, letting him know it's alright. "You're right, Bolin. You two might be more help in a fight, but that's exactly why you should stay with the kids for now. Just get back quickly in case we need back up." She lets her glove glow a little. "Hopefully we won't." Then she turns and races to the door, not waiting for a reply.

* * *

She should have known it was a trap.

A frantic message from Mako, just as she reaches the top of the stairs, tells her that they'd been trapped in the basement with the kids, and Bolin is trying to find a way to break through the earth. Someone or something had barricaded the neighboring building, then barricaded the door behind them, effectively locking them in total darkness underground.

As she adjusts the eyepiece linked to her phone, she sees a message blink into being in the upper right hand corner.

He's contacted the Chief, and hopefully she would spare a unit to help rescue them. Asami takes a deep, calming breath, panic once again seizing her, before she opens the door.

A gust of wind nearly sends her tumbling back down the stairs. Lifting her hand to shield her eyes against grains of dirt, she tries to make sense of the erratic noises happening around her, but all she hears is the wind screaming past her, the dirt pelting against her face, for long moments. Her heart leaps to her throat.

And then the wind and noise and screaming stops, finally. She keeps her gloved hand raised, just in case, and takes a step out onto the rooftop.

It's empty.

Then something whips past her, large and moving impossibly fast, and collides with the rooftop. Debris kicks up and Asami dodges to the side. When she rolls to her feet, electricity bristling over her hand, she looks up and her heart stops.

The Avatar is crouched on the roof. _She's alive_ , Asami thinks, and the tightness in her chest that has been haunting her all day, since the moment she saw the Avatar's shoulders slump under an impossible burden, eases.

But she looks again, and her raised hand drops to the side. A vice grips her throat, choking her, making her vision blur for a moment in shock.

The Avatar is crouched, and around her bare wrists and ankles are broken chains. The muscles in her arms tense and loosen reflexively, almost like a long, slow twitch, and Asami reads the pain lying just beneath the surface of her skin. Asami can't help but begin moving toward her in some subconscious response to the agony she knows the other woman must be experiencing.

"Get up, Avatar!" a voice calls from above, and she freezes.

 _Zaheer._

And then the Avatar's head rises, and from her angle Asami just barely makes out her face, which has apparently become unmasked somewhere along the way.

Where the other woman's eyes would be were two glowing, piercing pools of light, and the sight of them strikes Asami. She's only seen the Avatar like this once before. With Amon, and the Equalists, and Asami's father, but she doesn't think about that anymore, doesn't want to think about it because it makes her hands shake and her head fog with rage and confusion, so she tries to focus on the Avatar, who maybe isn't beyond saving. Unlike her father.

Asami tries to get closer, but there is a burst of heat that races across her skin like a hot, hot touch and the Avatar has thundered into the air. Somewhere, the superhero has lost her shoes, and the chains trail behind her.

 _What have they done to you?_

"Call Main Factory," she murmurs, the eyepiece automatically dialing the manager at the Republic City factory. A brush of air against the back of her neck, though, startles her, and she whirls with her fists raised. She finds herself staring into calm, gray-blue eyes.

"There is not much we can do now, Miss Sato," says Councilman Tenzin. For a moment, Asami sees an image of the girl with two buns in her hair. With a sinking feeling, she realizes that his children must be trapped underground with Bolin and Mako. He turns his gaze up and, despite the calm in his tone, she sees him clench his hands behind his back. "If we interfere, we may only end up hurting…the Avatar more." Something about his hesitation makes her wonder if he _knows_ the superhero, knows her name, but Asami's train of thought is interrupted when the call she's placed finally connects.

 _"Miss Sato?"_ queries a voice in her ear. The factory. Slowly, she raises her hand and disconnects the call.

She turns her attention above them, seeing only brief, flashes of light and two bodies racing across the rooftops of taller buildings. "So what do we do?" she asks quietly.

Tenzin turns to her with a grim expression. "We wait."

* * *

By the time Mako and Bolin run onto the rooftop, having freed the children finally, panting and dirty but otherwise unharmed, the fight begins to turn for the worse. For a time, Zaheer and the Avatar drifted away, but they've slowly been making their way back to the original building. Asami has been too worried to cringe at the destruction to the city, though she knows she'll have to begin planning to rebuild. After.

 _After_.

It feels like there will never be an after, that this fight will go on forever, the Avatar's body endlessly being tossed into windows, rooftops, concrete sidewalks that Asami herself has designed. Each impact shakes Asami, makes her feel like somehow, it's _her_ hurting the other woman, the impossibly noble, strong, self-sacrificing woman who is so stubborn but so _good_.

And then, as they approach again, she sees Zaheer do something that will haunt her dreams.

He begins to suck the _air_ out of the Avatar's lungs. A gray cloud surrounds her head, the air trailing out of her in a thin and reedy gasp. Even from the rooftop they can all hear her choking, see her body convulsing, the glow in her eyes sparking like faint lightning.

"We have to do something!" Mako cries. "Why are you just standing there?!"

Tenzin merely shakes his head. "If we try to attack from above, we might end up hitting the Avatar, Detective. And none of us possess the ability to fly, or a strong enough ability to reach him from here."

Asami feels numb.

She is watching the Avatar die, choking, gasping, chains dragging her arms and feet down, and she is powerless to stop it.

Asami wonders, distantly, what the city will do without her. Who will save children, and kittens stuck on windowsills, and stop gangs from harassing stores? Who will force the council members to think about more than political gains?

Who will fight alongside Asami in the face of injustice, and pain, and horrors, the way she had during Amon and the uprising of the Equalists?

Who will look at her, really look at her, and see more than a prissy rich girl? See more than the public face? Who will _laugh_ the way the Avatar laughs, full and deep and much richer than money could ever make Asami?

 _After_.

Asami feels, in that moment, that there will never be _after_. There will never be anything that could follow this moment, except numbness, and fear, and pain.

"Daddy!"

Somewhere behind them, a hundred tiny feet had plodded up the stairwell, and all of them turn around with a start, having been too worried about the Avatar to notice.

Councilman Tenzin's eyebrows rise in shock. "Meelo? What—Mako, didn't you—"

"We brought them to safety! I don't know how they got up here!"

"Daddy, we can help!"

Her mind working much more slowly than usual, Asami finally realizes—

The children all have superpowers. If enough of them work together…

And Zaheer turns toward them, finally seeing the small crowd of determined faces, and lets the Avatar go. Before he can do anything, however, the children have begun an elaborate movement, which Tenzin hastily joins, his face caught between surprise, pride, and fear. The Avatar's body crashes into a rooftop a block away, and immediately Asami turns to run down the stairs.

She doesn't see what happens, but she will read it a thousand times in the newspapers in the months to come:

 _Super Children Save the Avatar!_

 _Is Our Hero Done For?_

 _Why Did It Take Children to Save Republic City Superhero?_

She runs down to the dark room they were in before, but instead of returning to the basement, she races to the front of the building, where she finds a glass door broken in. Absently, she wonders which of the children had the courage to break through. Outside, police officers are gathered, staring up at the fight in awe as a huge, whirling gust of air gathers just above.

Asami pays it no attention, though, as she turns a corner, dashing down an alley and out to the other side.

It will only be later, in the eerie not-quite-calm after the battle, that she will wonder why it was so important to her to find the Avatar, why she simply left Mako and Bolin behind, who worked with the Avatar nearly as much as she did over the last year.

It will only be later that she would wonder why she was so worried about never hearing the Avatar laugh again.

Asami bursts into a familiar building—she'd done repairs to its gas lines earlier that year—and runs past workers who are staring up at the sky with their mouths open. "A tornado!" she thinks she hears one cry, but she's too busy finding the elevator. She rides it to the top floor, then frantically stumbles around a corner to the roof access, which is a thin, rusting ladder forgotten in a small closet.

She climbs to the top and there, in the rubble of concrete and dust and blood— _oh god blood_ —is the Avatar.

Someone else is already there, though, and Asami feels her limbs run cold, because the man is kneeling next to her, holding her—and crying.

He raises his face, and she is suddenly pierced with bright blue eyes. The strong jawline is familiar, and she knows, instantly, this man must be the Avatar's father. He protectively shields her face from Asami.

"You should go, Miss Sato," he says, and while the words make her rock back on her heels, while the words make her heart shrink and harden, she understands.

The Avatar needs to be protected.

And even though she's just met the man, she knows what he must also know: Asami Sato isn't, can't be, the one who protects her. Asami Sato, CEO, dogged constantly by the press, by people gaping at her as she drives by in the newest Satomobile—Asami Sato, who would be instantly recognized at any hospital. Asami Sato, known sidekick to the Avatar.

If Asami Sato knew the Avatar's identity, it would place them both in jeopardy.

Especially if the Avatar was vulnerable.

Her eyes burn, but she nods her head.

Asami Sato leaves the building.

It will be three years before she sees the Avatar again.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: Oops. Chapter creep happened. I was going to make it one chapter, but it started getting pretty long, and I'm going out of town and probably won't be able to post for a while, so I wanted to get this up. It's a bit unedited. Sorry! Only one more chapter, I promise. And right now it looks like there will also be a sequel. Because why not ;) And potentially some one-shot prequels. We'll see!_

* * *

Sometimes, at night, she dreams in gray.

Asami Sato doesn't usually remember her dreams. She remembers being a child and asking her father—

Her father—

(Her brain skips on the words.)

-She remembers asking - what it's like to dream. The most she ever remembers is vague impressions, colors swirling in and around one another, lightning crossing behind her eyelids like circuits as her overworked brain repeats drafting patterns over and over again. She'd been disappointed as a child to hear other people's stories of amazing adventures. She'd been disappointed to close her eyes at night and see nothing.

Lately, when she does dream, it's gray, and loud. There are vague impressions of debris, and fear, and running. (Asami Sato is good at running.)

(Asami Sato does not think about what the dreams mean.)

Today, Asami Sato is trying to forget the gray. She abandons the polished gray of chrome and instead makes her way to a new project.

On the mannequin in front of her is a skin-tight red suit.

Zhu Li is waiting nearby with a clipboard. "Councilman Tenzin is waiting, ma'am."

Asami looks at the wingsuit, trying to burn the bright red into her mind, trying to drive out the gray.

It doesn't work.

Sighing, she turns to Zhu Li. "Please send him out to the test course."

The first test fails.

Tenzin's body hurtles into the inflatable air bag, affectionately titled "The Blob," and she watches the red figure bounce a few times. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she tries to ignore the calm, but irritatingly constant presence of Zhu Li. Not that she didn't appreciate her help while Varrick was off doing who knows what for _that woman_ —

"Ma'am?"

Asami does what she does best and forces herself to think. She's found herself easily annoyed, recently, and it was making it difficult to work on extended projects. Particularly ones that had no immediate return investment, much to her stockholders' annoyance. Thinking, though, iss safe.

Doing a few brief mental calculations, she asks Zhu Li to order a different fabric with a higher concentration of spandex.

* * *

It's the first of many failures.

Asami Sato is good at running away.

Right now, she's thankful for it, as she dodges away from a Triad member's overzealous fireball and off the edge of the low roof. Tucking and rolling to soften the landing, she eventually springs to her feet and wheels around with her glove ready, certain he's in pursuit—

Only to see his body viciously knocked from the air by a fast-moving object. It hits the ground with a sickening crunch.

A metal ball drops onto his body.

Asami turns away before the ball's owner steps into view. Activating her eyepiece, she types in a few code words for the self-starter on the newest, experimental Satomobile and makes her way down the alley.

"Leaving so soon, Miss Sato?"

She continues to walk away as she replies, the familiar irritation making her head pound. "I have to return to my company." Another trial with Tenzin was scheduled later, and he was also bringing one or two of his children along to test the smaller models. Hopefully, their smaller, less dense bodies might actually provide her with more data to work with.

"The wingsuits again? You know as well as I do that they're a waste of time and money."

Asami stops. She knows what's coming.

Her father—

 _Her father—_

"Your father built your empire on weapons, Miss Sato. Surely that technology still exists somewhere."

Refusing to turn, Asami waits for her Satomobile to geolocate her and arrive. Considering the network of alleys and rooftops she climbed to get here, it would most likely take…

(Her mind runs calculations to ignore the presence of the other woman at her back.)

…Approximately 1.3 more minutes.

 _Shit_.

"Surely it would be better for all of us, in Republic City and the world, if we had better weapons and powers to strike back against terrorist threats."

Clenching her fists, Asami turns slowly on her heel. Underneath the thick sole, she can just barely feel loose pavement crunch under her boot.

She finishes turning and looks the other woman in the eye.

Clad in her metal and green uniform is the Great Uniter, eyebrows angled up and hands clasped behind her back. The metal ball is hanging in the air just behind her and Asami swears she sees a bloodstain on it.

It's been two years since the Avatar left, and her absence has left a conspicuous vacuum in Republic City. One filled by murderers, gangs, and now…this superhero.

If one could even call her that.

"I don't make weapons," Asami says. Her voice is calm; it's the trained voice her publicist has taught her, even and controlled just in the middle of her throat. Not too high, not too low. Not a single tremor.

"But you could." In the background, Asami makes out a few other people in green shirts milling about the alley.

Her eyepiece is counting down to the arrival of her Satomobile.

 _Twenty-two seconds._

"I'm sorry to cut this short, _Great Uniter_ ," the name is acid on her tongue, "but I have work I need to do, and people to help." She turns again just as she hears her car rumbling up the alley.

"We could help more people with you on our side!" she hears from behind her, the deep voice easily cutting across the higher hum of her car's electric motor as it approaches. "We could save the world! The Great Uniter and Future Industries—uniting us toward a common future—"

Asami vaults into her car over the door, and spares a final, cool glance for the other woman. "I'm sorry, but I'm no one's sidekick."

The sentence feels heavy in her mouth, and she watches the other woman's eyebrows raise in surprise.

Ashamed, suddenly, of losing her temper, even slightly, Asami guns the engine and tears out of the alley.

 _Her father._

* * *

Asami writes the Avatar a letter that night. Tenzin had indicated he had some way of contacting her. She's kept her distance, until now, something about the gray and the dust having kept her from putting pen to paper.

If she writes, she'll remember.

Asami doesn't want to remember.

Yet, there's a part of her that does, too—a part of her that longs for the adventure, the mayhem, the careless, crooked grin. It all seems a lifetime ago. She's not old, but she feels impossibly aged in that moment, thinking about how _young_ both of them had been. Barely out of adolescence, hot-headed and brave and stupid, running into danger over and over again.

Suffering, over and over again.

Asami should have known it wouldn't last long.

She hasn't heard from the Avatar at all. She doesn't even know if Tenzin would have thought to give her her contact information. They were barely even friends, before Zaheer; now, they may as well be strangers. How much have they changed, in their time apart? How much did they even know each other to begin with?

Asami feels, sometimes, that she's deluded herself into imagining some kind of closeness between them, that she's just imagined she could read the signs of the Avatar's body in the tensing of a fist, or a twitch of the corner of her mouth, or in the particular pitch of her laugh that day. That the Avatar has a particular laugh with her, even, away from Mako or Bolin or the Chief, just the two of them dangling their feet off of rooftops and listening to the cacophony of radios and cars and voices of the city as a hundred tiny lights blinked into and out of existence like twinkling stars, the real ones no longer visible from light pollution. But they hadn't needed them, not up there, not together, with their elbows just barely touching, the hum of a long day of adventure finally drifting away in the comfortable silence.

Asami feels she's deluded herself about a lot of things.

 _I'm nobody's sidekick._ Well, maybe she'd never been one, anyway. She always forgets, conveniently, all the times the Avatar tried to keep her out of some of their missions, how sometimes she'd been sidelined as a driver while Mako and Bolin took care of whatever was going on.

Maybe the Avatar had never really liked her to begin with.

Asami presses her lips together firmly and feels her lipstick stick for a moment on her bottom lip. _Think._

Her pen presses to paper, and she composes a letter, all the while speaking it to herself in that calm, measured publicist's voice.

 _Dear Korra,_

 _I miss you._

Her pen hovers over the words. It is a little too honest, but they are there, now, and she finds herself suddenly unwilling to take them back.

Missing doesn't necessarily mean anything, right?

(Asami is so, _so_ good at running away, even in her own mind.)

 _It's not the same in Republic City without you._

She hesitates, considering mentioning the Great Uniter.

But she remembers, sometimes, the pinch of self-doubt in the lines of the Avatar's mouth, the self-recrimination when they'd been fighting Amon, the agony as she realized an entire population of people in the city had felt unsafe and oppressed.

Briefly tightening her fingers at the memory, she takes a deep breath. _Think_. She moves on.

 _How are you feeling?_

It's probably a silly question, but Asami can't help but ask. Reports from Tenzin had been worrying. Something about the Avatar not having use of her legs, or even her powers, really. (Somewhere, under the pile of wingsuit designs, is a sketch of an electric wheelchair, one suited specifically for the Avatar's skills and taste for adventure. She tells herself that's why she's asking—to get more data, for this secret, half-formed project barely more than an idea at this point.)

 _Things are going well here._

She hears her publicist's voice in that one, but the lie is so much better than the truth, and she's not even sure the Avatar would want to hear the truth, anyway.

 _I just got a big contract to help redesign the city's infrastructure, so I'll be keeping pretty busy for a while._

A city that integrates superheroes with civilians, benders and non-benders. It's the main project bringing her income, right now, and she wants to feel passionate about it, she really does, but all it reminds her of is the slow remodeling they had to do after Zaheer, and the Red Lotus, and all the places Asami measured the impacts left by the Avatar's body.

She hesitates, having run out of things to say. Her life really isn't that interesting anymore, since the Great Uniter has taken over most of the superhero work. Especially now that she's completed the wingsuits.

 _Be well, Avatar._

 _A._ _Sato_

She folds the letter into the envelope and presses it to her forehead for a long while. The clock ticks in the background, and it is utterly silent in the mansion.

Asami doesn't move for a long time.

* * *

The Avatar writes back, and for the first time since her father went to jail, Asami cries.

It is a controlled cry, something she allows herself for just a few minutes, late one night down in the garage. She has dirt up to her elbows and a new burn mark or two on her hands from soldering wires together too hastily. She'd refused to let herself read the letter until she was done for the night.

Already marred by a teardrop or two, the letter reads:

 _Asami,_

 _I'm sorry I haven't written to you sooner, but every time I've tried, I never know what to say._

For a moment, she simply rereads that first sentence over and over again, tracing the bold, slightly uneven writing. She wonders what might be so difficult for the Avatar to say, then wonders why she's wondering about that, or why there's a weird little feeling of hope in the base of her skull.

She shakes her head and moves on.

 _The past two years have been the hardest of my life. Even though I can get around fine now, I still don't have complete control over my powers, yet. I keep having visions of Zaheer and what happened that day._

Asami's hand clenches around the letter, and she sees, briefly, the flash of gray as concrete breaks and trembles at the impact of the Avatar's body.

 _The doctor here thinks a lot of this is in my head, so I've been trying meditation lot—_

Asami reads between the lines. It's what she's always had to do. Over the last year, they've carefully danced around their real selves. The Avatar and Asami Sato, CEO and Professional Genius. Except both know that isn't the whole story, but they have no choice to address each other that way, living in a world whose currency is information.

 _The doctor here thinks a lot of this is in my head._

In her mind, she pictures that day, the Avatar's glowing eyes as what had apparently been poison set in, activating some uncontrollable superpower. She wonders if there's a difference between poisoning someone's body and poisoning someone's mind.

(Sometimes she feels like her mind was poisoned that day by gray, and helplessness.)

 _It helps. A little._

 _Still, I worry I'll never fully recover. Please don't tell Mako and Bolin I wrote to you and not them. I don't want to hurt their feelings, but it's easier to tell you this stuff. I don't think they'd understand._

(The image appears again, of them on the rooftop, the twinkling starlights of a hundred windows and lives moving about the city, the steady hum of the engines, far enough below that there is a comfortable silence between them. The hesitant brush of limb against limb, maybe accidental, maybe not, but it doesn't matter either way, up here, in this other world. Just the two of them.)

 _Try to stay safe. Tenzin has told me some of what's going on._

 _I worry about you._

There is a single character signed at the bottom, which could mean different things depending on the context.

Asami stares at the hastily scrawled character for a long time. It is the only clue she has to the Avatar's life outside of her title, and she traces the lines of the character to memorize them in her mind.

The clock ticks in the background, somehow only exaggerating the stillness of the workshop.

(She has always liked the steady rhythm. It grounds her, somehow. But not tonight.)

She presses the letter to her chest and sits in silence, imagining a rooftop, impossibly high, and the warm sky of the city lit by a halo of activity from below.

She misses being nineteen, and silly, and hopelessly following a superhero around for—

For what, she won't admit yet.

The silence of her workshop is answer enough, for now.

* * *

The Avatar is missing.

It is a refrain that thrums in the back of Asami's mind, rhythmically pounding regret and fear and distress and hurt into her thoughts.

The Avatar is missing.

It's been too much, these last months. The wild hope, the expectation, at hearing she would return soon—only to have arrived at the docks with Tenzin and Mako and Bolin and to have found not the Avatar, but the Avatar's father.

The Avatar is missing, and things have fallen apart. In the city, now swarmed by troops, superpowered and ordinary alike. In her life, as she's retreated further into her workshop despite the eventual success of the wingsuit.

(And, a part of Asami whispers quietly, she's fallen apart in places deeper and darker than her workshop, places she doesn't want to acknowledge exist.)

Asami dodges a ball of metal. It careens wildly into the building behind her, showering the street with concrete and glass.

The Avatar is missing, but it's fine. It's fine. It's fine.

(Asami Sato is no one's sidekick.)

The Great Uniter lazily flicks metal bands at Asami. A chunk of earth flies across her field of vision, the metal gripping into the face of the rock as it tumbles to the ground. From her other side, a ball of flame jets at the woman, who merely tilts to the side. Mako's shot singes her hair, but otherwise passes into the air like a distant comet, fizzling out some yards away.

For whatever purpose, the Great Uniter always keeps her face and head uncovered. It's something that Asami thinks about, sometimes, while she's in her workshop trying to draft something, anything that could help them.

It suggests either that she is overly confident, convinced that even if others knew her identity, she would never come to harm, or it suggests the woman doesn't have an identity to protect.

In some way, the Great Uniter's transparency in all but name seems like a weakness, but Asami can't put her finger on why. And she is hesitant to exploit the vulnerability.

She doesn't have an answer for that, either, except that when she thinks about it, thinks about the technology for facial recognition now proliferating through databases just at the tips of her fingers, she can't bring herself to do anything about it.

(In the back of her mind, she knows it has something to do with the image of the Avatar's father, covering her face protectively – something to do with the blood and the brokenness of the other woman's body, the vulnerability.)

(Asami cannot bring herself to exploit that.)

Tucking forward into a tight roll, Asami brings her fist up with a jet of electricity arcing off of it. She manages to catch the metal edge of the woman's sleeve with a bolt of electric blue as she rises from her roll. The Great Uniter rears back in pain, her foot stamping the ground, and then something hard and fast strikes Asami's chin. She reels back from the blow— _concrete_ , she thinks, wondering how there could possibly be enough earth in the substance for the woman to manipulate at all—and falls back. The buzzing in her ears conceals the majority of the ensuing scuffle she hears between the brothers and the super villain, and there are grunts and slams and the hissing of flames, and then all of a sudden everything stops.

A muted quiet has fallen over the street, and Asami begins to sit up. The buzzing has stopped, and for an absurd moment she thinks she's somehow gone deaf, but then in the distance she hears a siren and the yells of the Chief's officers as they fight against the Uniter's supporters. Her army of green and metal and near fanaticism has probably seized most government buildings by now.

Her vision is somewhat blurry, and she vaguely makes out the discarded chunk of concrete lying on the ground in front of her.

Raising her eyes, she sees the Great Uniter is standing with an odd expression on her face, one hand raised—the one Asami shocked is hanging limply, occasionally twitching, she notices with a rather ungenerous sense of satisfaction—and she's looking at something…some _one_ …

But it's all wrong, because instead of blue there's green and instead of a proud confidence there is terror. Asami follows that familiar jawline and sees no determined set, just a small tremor visible even from her position several yards away.

Still—

Still…

Asami is looking at the Avatar, and she is _alive_ and whole and real, and even though Asami _knew_ that, she's always worried that maybe she was somehow dreaming it all up. The adventure, the talks, the brushing of elbows, the teasing bickering. And looking back on it all, something has changed now in the way Asami looks at her; something else has grown up just underneath her ribcage –

 _I worry about you—_

"Avatar," the Great Uniter says, and the word is somewhere between gloating and mocking and something else—something almost hesitant.

 _Avatar_.

Asami is torn between the stupid little giddiness in her heart that feels like long nights spent on rooftops watching the starless sky and a very real, very sudden fear.

She feels her eyes begin to burn. Vaguely, she hears Bolin yelling and cheering, but he doesn't see what she sees. He doesn't see the Avatar lying broken, cradled by her father; he doesn't see _I'll never fully recover_ ; he doesn't see the tremor in her jaw, the compulsive, nervous clenching of her fists.

The Avatar gazes straight ahead, just over the Great Uniter's shoulder. "I can't let you hurt the people in Republic City anymore." The words are tired.

 _I'll never fully recover._

"Fight me, then," the Great Uniter taunts, hesitance gone, and it's obvious she's seen exactly what Asami's seen. "You and me. No one else needs to get hurt. Stop me, Avatar." Her eyebrow lifts as she crouches into a firm stance. There is a taunt in her voice, a daring, an arrogance that grates at Asami.

There is still that lingering fear, too, because for the first time, she is not sure the Avatar can win. She finally lifts herself to her feet and casts a hesitant look at the Avatar, lifting her gloved fist. The other woman shakes her head shallowly, and Asami stands for a moment, the emotions of the day pounding through her blood, before she reluctantly joins Mako and Bolin to the side.

Wordlessly, the Avatar mirrors Kuvira's stance, eyebrows furrowing above a green mask. Her fists shake in front of her. The Great Uniter waits, assessing, then strikes like a snake, all quickness and agility but with strength waiting just at the end of her fist.

The Avatar charges forward to meet her.


End file.
